Osirium @ Pycon: The story behind the Osirium ‘O’

We’re going to PyCon this week, so if you’re a keen Python developer we’ll see you there! In fact, this year we are a silver sponsor.

Just for fun, we thought we’d make an animated Osirium ‘O’ that would react to tweets @osirium.

We took a NeoPixel driver library by Jeremy Garff https://github.com/jgarff/rpi_ws281x that has Python bindings and then optimised it to be as fast as we could get it. It’s running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a whole £9.60 worth of computing horsepower.

The next stage was to be able to pass it pattern generators. That’s where our work experience intern Rachel (16) started. She has written a series of generators to show time-related patterns and branded patterns—and interfaced with the Twitter API to make the ‘O’ respond to your tweets!

We found that Rachel is pretty good at writing code in Python, and she’s learnt about writing code with other people: for example, ‘separation of concerns’ and how other people read your code.